Are you my elder?
On Ina May Gaskin, white supremacy, and inhabiting the spaces we'd rather ignore
About a month ago, I shared a post on Instagram challenging the narrative that people can cause their own labors to be difficult or long because they have somehow failed to “surrender” to birth. So often as a midwife I’ve heard other birthworkers talk about difficult births and conclude that it was the birthgivers’ own mind — whether their fear of pain or the unknown, their resolute clinging to control, their past traumas — that was the main obstacle to birth going smoothly. Parading as a sort of concern or attunement with a client’s emotional life, this quasi-diagnosis is often shared somewhat condescendingly or dismissively as though birthgiver simply has not done enough work to transcend what they ought to have transcended: paradoxically, as if the outcome was controllable had they just controlled their relinquishing of control. And while I could write about just this paradigm, its roots, and its harm for an entire newsletter (and maybe someday I will), what I want to focus on today is how much of the response to the piece revolved not around the idea that this is a paradigm we ought to disrupt and divest from, but the the fact that I invoked midwife Ina May Gaskin in it.
My invocation was actually, to me, a sort of casual one. I mentioned her only to point to her as the midwife who has probably contributed most to the popularization of this narrative (though she herself, I think, mostly inherited it from obstetrician Grantly Dick-Read; more on that later). Her transphobia and racism, I thought, was common knowledge and relatively uncontroversial for an audience reading in 2025. But, I was wrong. For a not insubstantial number of commenters, the two slides of ten involving Gaskin were the major takeaway of the entire piece. Many requested more information because they didn’t know about her “dark side.” I lost a lot of followers. One announced their departure as being because “midwives don’t shit on each other, especially an elder.”
And it occurred to me, then, that it was probably worth writing in a little more detail about the hero-worship around Gaskin, a worship that has apparently persisted despite her transphobia and white supremacy being well known for at least the last decade, and allegations around her and her husband’s Farm becoming more and more public in recent years as well. It occurred to me, too, that critically examining this hero-worship is particularly important right now, when more details about the harms of the Freebirth Society are coming to light (hear my speak on that here; and read about it yourself here), and in the wake of the tremendous loss of Black midwife Janell Green Smith because, in fact, all of these threads are connected. That people can still herald Gaskin uncritically as the “mother of modern midwifery” is emblematic of a culture that also allows grifters to make 12 million dollars off of vulnerable birthgivers (even as they play a role in the deaths of their babies), and whose accumulated stressors contribute to the deaths of Black birthgivers.
Because the fact of the matter is, even the paradigm that inspired me to write the piece — that we must transcend pain and fear in birth — is at it roots a colonial-capitalist, white supremacist belief, one that rests in centuries of false dichotomies between “civilized” and “primitive” birthgivers. And we need to, as a community, interrogate those roots before we accept them as fact. We cannot grow liberatory futures from rotten roots; and so we need to trace our roots deep down and face them.
So let’s.
A hero for w(h)om(b)?
I want to establish something at the outset. Almost every comment regarding Gaskin on that post, which to me can be interpreted as a marker of who has a stake in the narrative around her, was made by people who were, at the very least, white presenting. And I will admit here that my own blithe assumption that my mention of her could be casual speaks to a larger truth: if Gaskin was ever a hero, it was to very specific people. I personally did not feel like I was “shitting” on an “elder” in that post, because she was never part of my midwifery lineage. Many Black midwives expressed similar sentiments after controversy erupted after Gaskin more or less blamed Black birthgivers for their own racial disparities in a talk in 2017 (I’ll discuss this more later); they did not have to grapple with one of their heroes falling, because she never was one.
I first picked up Spiritual Midwifery, Ina May Gaskin’s 1975 book, as a young woman voraciously searching for any and all literature on homebirth that I could find. I was an academic who had first started reading about the history of midwifery academically, but eventually began consuming books about it from a more personal perspective, as I began to fantasize about becoming pregnant and having my own homebirth (and, later, of leaving academia to become a midwife myself). But even as her so-called “target audience,” Gaskin held very little resonance or inspiration for me. I could barely get through Spiritual Midwifery; I also found myself uninspired by her follow-up, Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth (which remains in the top ten bestsellers of pregnancy and birth related books on Amazon even today). What I did read of both was read with a sort of distant anthropological curiosity. And why wouldn’t I feel that distance? It so clearly wasn’t for me. The pictures and stories were all of white hippies. They walked past cows on a farm in labor. Their reality couldn’t have seemed less relevant to mine, a biracial Pakistani who would eventually be giving birth in New York City. I intuitively found myself turning away from stories where white midwives helped white women transcend their brain to “surrender” to their bodies, where white men telling their white wives how marvelous and sexy they were was the only thing that allowed their cervices to open. Something about it, though I’m not sure I could have articulated it at the time, left a bad taste in my mouth. Besides, I knew enough about the history to know that while Ina May Gaskin and her clearly high friends were having orgasmic births on their unregulated birth center, Black midwives were being villainized and regulated-to-eradication all around them (more on this in just a moment).
When people say, “we can’t deny the powerful and positive impacts she’s had,” I wonder, who is “we?” Is Ina May my elder simply because I practice in the United States, and she has indubitably influenced midwifery in this country? Do we assume I couldn’t exist as a midwife in the way I exist as a midwife if she didn’t? An if that’s the definition of an elder, is J. Marion Simms, the obstetrician who performed dozens of experimental surgeries on Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy — the women he enslaved — also my elder? I do, after all, use his speculum routinely (although a good half of my clients now do their own screening for cervical cancer!).1 Where is the line, and who gets to tell me where it lies? What do I owe the people who came before me, and to which people do I owe it?
To be said more plainly: white heroes for white people are not heroes for everyone, and I think white people tend to forget that. 2 That everyone assumes that whiteness is the center.
And this is part of why, I think, people might experience my calling Ina May Gaskin a “white supremacist” as offensive, as some kind of intense, slanderous insult: to them, a white supremacist wears a white hood and cites replacement theory and uses slurs. White supremacists lurk on Nazi message boards and try to get books about the history of enslavement banned and openly admit that they see a Black pilot they hope, “boy, I hope he’s qualified,” or say on-air that“stupid and unskilled Mexicans” should do the menial labor white Americans don’t want to do. White supremacists don’t travel to Guatemala to help people after earthquakes (even if they then steal knowledges from those people and then peddle it is its own), right? White supremacists don’t host Black Panthers on their farms to teach them about midwifery.3
But in actuality to be white supremacist is as simple as to center whiteness as the norm, the standard. It does not mean you have to be overtly racist. It simply requires you be complicit in it, to not question it, to refuse to dismantle some of the foundations on which the overt violences can continue on, undisrupted.
